The drill will be carried out in darkness in a hangar at the Airbus plant in the north German city of Hamburg, using employees and volunteers selected from 11,000 applicants.

Each volunteer will get a free meal and 60 euros (72 dollars) for the test, which will be recorded on video from nearly 40 different camera angles and overseen by officials of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

To make the Airbus test as realistic as possible, there will be blankets, pillows and newspapers strewn around the aircraft and some of the passengers will be carrying dolls in their arms as they head for the emergency chutes.

Even if everyone on board is evacuated within the allotted time it is no guarantee that Airbus has passed the test. Only after evaluating the video footage to see if any modifications are needed to the evacuation procedure will the EASA grant a certification.

Interesting to hear 11,000 volunteers applied for the test - quite a large number, considering the risks of such an evacuation.

Quoting A360 (Reply 9):BBC talks about 650, but I thought it was intended to be 853??

That is the minimum, as supposedly a customer wants to put that many when the start service of their planes, I suspect EK. The more the better, its not like 800+ seats are going to be filled anytime soon, the market for this plane is rather young.

The meaning of life is curiosity; we were put on this planet to explore opportunities.

I think BBC got confused because a) first news site says test will be done with 850 and b) this sentence from the bbc site otherwise didn't make sense:
"We are happy with anything above that(650)," Airbus spokeswoman Barbara Kracht said of the procedure.